Leveraging big data to gain a competitive advantage across a range of industries

In their efforts to extract value from big data, organizations around the world are turning to the Hadoop big data collection, management and analysis platform. Hadoop offers two important services: store any kind of data from any source, inexpensively and at very large scale, and perform sophisticated analysis of that data easily and quickly. This value proposition makes the open source Hadoop ecosystem attractive for diverse use cases across a wide range of industries. This business-oriented white paper summarizes the wide-ranging benefits of the Hadoop platform, highlights common data processing use cases and explores examples of specific use cases in vertical industries. The information presented here draws on the collective experiences of three leaders in the use of Hadoop technologies—Dell and its partners Cloudera and Intel.

The Hadoop platform

The open source Hadoop platform was originally developed by the world’s largest Internet companies to capture and analyze the massive amounts of data they generate. Unlike earlier platforms, Hadoop can store any kind of data in its native format—structured, unstructured or semi-structured—and be used to perform a wide variety of analyses and transformations on that data. Hadoop allows your organization to store petabytes, and even exabytes, of data cost-effectively. As the amount of data in a cluster grows, you can add new servers with local storage incrementally and inexpensively. Thanks to the use of MapReduce framework, which takes advantage of the parallel processing power of the servers in the cluster, a 100-node Hadoop instance can answer questions on 100 terabytes of data just as quickly as a 10-node instance can answer questions on 10 terabytes.